by Earl Monroe
Now, they still had Greer and Cunningham but, like I said, they weren’t the force they had been. Cunningham was still a great player who could jump out of the gym and put the ball in the basket with that left-handed jump shot of his. Born in Brooklyn, Billy was a fierce competitor who just never quit. He was six foot six with brown-red hair and a pigeon-toed walk that made him look like he was falling down when he walked toward you off the court. But you couldn’t let that fool you into thinking he couldn’t play because he could, and he came to do it every night he set foot on the court.
Hal Greer, who was Cunningham’s sidekick for many years, was another thing altogether. He could really play also, but he and Billy were complete opposites of each other. Billy was outgoing, with a large personality, an electrifying player. He always wore a big smile on his face and that was reflected in his approach to the game. Hal, on the other hand, was quiet but steady as a ballplayer. To look at him, you wouldn’t have thought he was as good as he was. He was six foot two, 175 pounds. I know a lot of players—including me—who used to say to themselves when they first saw him, What’s he going to do out there on the floor?
That was a mistake, because we soon found out exactly what he could do. Now, Hal wasn’t a leaper. Nothing like that. And even after you knew who he was you would say to yourself, Okay, I’m going to come here tonight and just roll over him and not let him shoot.
But that wouldn’t happen. The next thing you knew, Hal would have 25 or 30 points on you and you’d be wondering what he did to get all those points. Every night. Steady. Got them coming off screens. One-on-one. You knew he was going to pull up and shoot the jumper, but you were never ready for it. His ability to get into position to shoot that jumper is what made him great, because he knew when he was going to shoot it and the defender didn’t. You just couldn’t stop him from getting his shot off. That little jumper. And man, could he shoot the ball. I don’t care what the deal was, Hal was going to shoot the jumper—not from way out, but from around the free throw line and in the corners from maybe 18 feet. That’s where he got his shot and did his damage. He probably made more jump shots than anyone else in the history of the NBA. He even shot his free throws with a jump shot! Sometimes I used to wonder how he did it and I would find myself saying to someone, “How does he keep getting his shot off? Why doesn’t anybody stop him? Because we know what he’s going to do.”
But that didn’t matter, because he did it. He always got his shot off, no matter what you did to try to stop him. It was weird and a mystery. And that mystery is a part of all great players, because the thing that makes them great is the fact that they know when to do what they have to do and the defender doesn’t. And boy, was he deadly. He had a real slight build, and he wasn’t a great dribbler. Like I said, if you passed him on the street you wouldn’t think he was a basketball player. He wasn’t flamboyant. He had a quiet demeanor, was very soft-spoken. It’s funny, because when you think about all the great players, you never think about Hal Greer. But he was truly great, one of the best shooting guards of all time, a pleasure to watch play, and a real gentleman. But he was tough as nails on the court. Old number 15. He was something else.
Our wins and losses after the victory over Philadelphia kept alternating—we would win one or two, then lose one or two. We were just inconsistent the rest of the season. But we finally got the Knicks monkey off our backs when we beat them on February 22—George Washington’s birthday—110–104 at home in Baltimore in front of 9,000 appreciative fans. I really got off in that game, scoring 37 points. Walt Frazier—he was known as “Clyde”—had 30, and we both put on a show. But the really significant thing for me was that Gus outplayed Dave DeBusschere and Wes held his own against Willis on the boards.
Unfortunately, our team suffered a significant blow when, three days later, in a 115–113 loss to the Bucks, Kevin Loughery went down again with the same rib injury that had been plaguing him. Kevin would be out until the start of the playoffs, and Fred Carter would start in his place for the rest of the regular season. His injury was just another reminder of how our team—any team—had to stay healthy if we were going to be legitimate championship contenders. Already this season I had had lingering aches and pains in my knees. Mike Davis had gone down for almost a month, and now Kevin. All of this had taken a toll on our team and was one of the main reasons for our up-and-down play over the course of the season. Now we would just have to suck up Kevin’s loss and pull it together with a different lineup—which meant a different team chemistry and identity—until he got back.
The next time we played the Knicks was in New York on the 28th, the last day of February, and they beat us by 14 points, 115–101, in front of almost 20,000 fans all screaming for revenge. Dave DeBusschere rebounded in that game, outscoring Gus 23 to 6 and winning a bruising battle on the boards. This was our fifth loss to the Knicks of the season against only one win. So heading into the postseason, our prospects against them didn’t look as good as we’d thought they would at the beginning of the season. We still held out the hope that if we did meet them in the playoffs we could win, though, because we were a very confident team and crazy things are known to happen come playoff time.
Anyway, we went up to Philadelphia to play the 76ers there on March 1 and I came out of that game with only 1 point because of pain in my knees and because I had gotten sick to my stomach eating too many cheesesteak hoagies before the game. Now that was real embarrassing, especially because my poor performance was in front of my home folks, and we lost the game also, which was the most important thing. Philly beat us 104–99, with Hal Greer lighting us up for 38 points.
After going five and three over our next eight games—six of which were played on the road, including a double-overtime thriller in San Francisco—we won our last two games of the regular season, beating the Bulls and the Warriors. The team received a shock after the season ended, though, when Mike Davis went to the Buffalo Braves in the expansion draft.
We finished the regular season with a record of 50 wins and 32 losses, good enough for third in the Eastern Division (instead of first, which is where we’d thought we’d be when the season started). Those 50 wins earned us a playoff matchup with the Knicks, our hated enemy, in the Eastern Division Semifinals, starting on March 26 at the Garden.
We only had five days to prepare for the series, but we felt confident that we were ready. What we had to learn this time around in the playoffs was how to finish the Knicks off. What we’d come to understand when they’d swept us the year before was that they knew how to finish a series off and we didn’t, even though our team was missing Gus Johnson. To finish another team off, your team has to have a certain attitude, you know what I mean? When you and your guys go into a game everyone has to leave it all out on the floor, all the time. You have to play hard all the time. Because a lot of times when a team gets a big lead they feel as though they’ve got the game in hand and then start coasting. Or they start playing more cautiously and stop executing the way they were doing earlier in the game. Then suddenly they find themselves in a dogfight. They not only have to do better, but also pick up the momentum that they lost from before. If they don’t do this and the other team is coming on and gets over what I call “the hump,” then it’s very hard to beat that team. That’s what had happened to us the season before when the Knicks swept us. And it’s what happened to us again during the games we lost to the Knicks this season, too, regardless of our injury problems. We just weren’t finishing games and New York was, except in that one game when we beat them. They had finishers, guys like Dick Barnett, Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Dave DeBusschere, Bill Bradley, and Cazzie Russell. All of them knew how to throw the knockout blow on any team in the NBA. Even Dave Stallworth, who was coming off the bench, was a finisher. So, we had to become like that if we were to beat the Knicks, and we felt going in—having Kevin back at full strength would make this task easier—that we had finally arrived at this mindset as a team. We thought we were ready.
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br /> We started the series off, however, with two straight losses. They beat us up in New York on March 26 in double overtime, 120–117. I had 39 points in that game, outplaying Frazier, who had 16. Kevin came back to the squad in that game but still wasn’t himself, scoring only 7 points. But his presence alone lifted our spirits. All five of the Knicks’ starters reached double figures, with Willis Reed the high man with 30. It was an exciting game in front of a capacity crowd. Even though we lost, we felt good about our chances in the next game, because of how well we had met the challenge in Game One, with everyone playing very hard.
But, like I said, the next night we lost the game in Baltimore in front of more than 12,000 fans, 106–99. We were in this game up until the end, when they pulled away and won by 7. Gus led our team with 28 points, outplaying DeBusschere. Man, it was shaping up to be a war between those two great power forwards. Willis Reed again played a great game, scoring 27 to Wes Unseld’s 10 points, though both men had a ton of rebounds. Again we felt good about our effort in this game, even though we lost. So we were eager to play the next game, which would be up in the Big Apple on March 29.
I must say we went up there with fire in our eyes and beat them decisively in front of a packed house again, 127–113. We started the game well and were behind by only 1 point at the half. Then, in the third quarter, we stepped it up and went ahead by 11 points and never looked back. Six of our players reached double figures in that game, and I led the team with 25 points. Wes Unseld and Fred Carter got 23 apiece and Jack Marin notched 20, while Kevin scored 17, the most he had put up in a very long time. For the Knicks, Frazier played very well and got 24 points, while DeBusschere scored 12 in his head-to-head with Gus. But the good thing was that Wes outplayed Willis in that game—Reed only had 12 points—and Jack outplayed Bill Bradley, who only had 12. Now everyone on our team was pumped and feeling it. We all felt we could pull off winning the series after this victory, and that was great.
We came back to Baltimore for our next game on March 31, and in front of a crowd of more than 12,000 rabid fans cheering us on after every bucket we made, we won to tie the series. Again, we started out in front and held the lead all the way, though the Knicks did come back some, and beat them 102–92. I scored 34 points to Clyde’s 25 in our head-to-head matchup, while Gus outplayed DeBusschere, scoring 18 points to Dave’s 12. Now we had beat the Knicks two in a row, one more than we had beat them during the entirety of the past regular season, and we really liked our chances to forge ahead of them back up at the Garden on April 2.
But New York had regrouped and they ran us out of the Garden in Game Five, routing us by 21 points, 101–80, in front of a packed house. Although both teams had multiple players in double figures—we had four and they had five—it was really Willis Reed who made the big difference in that game, dominating with 36 points to Wes’s 10. I played okay, getting 18 points, while Clyde got 16, which I would call a draw. But, like I said, it was Willis Reed who dropped a hammer on our playoff chances in a game the Knicks led from start to finish. Now it was us who had to go back home and regroup, which we vowed we would do.
With our backs to the wall in Game Six we did just that, winning a thrilling back-and-forth game 96–87 in front of a boisterous, packed-to-the-rafters crowd. I played a very good game against Clyde that night, scoring 29 points to his 18 in our media-hyped one-on-one matchup. But Gus Johnson jumped all over Dave DeBusschere and won that celebrated duel 31 points to 4. It was Gus and me who made the difference in that game. We were thrilled as a team to be going back up to Madison Square Garden to play in the seventh and deciding game of the Eastern Division Semifinals.
But it wasn’t in the cards as the more experienced Knicks jumped all over us after the opening tip-off went their way, outscoring us in the first two quarters to lead by 15 points at the half. We mounted a comeback in the third quarter and cut the deficit to 6 points going into the final period, but they stepped on the gas and ended up winning the game by 13, at 127–114. Still, even in defeat, we could hold our heads up high as a team because we had fought hard and pushed a great team to its limit. But still—again—no cigar for us. We would just have to try again the next year, and we would, because now we were all confident we could beat this team that had become both our enemy and our destiny.
That year the Knicks went on to win the NBA championship, beating the Lakers in the Finals in seven games. Willis Reed was voted both the Finals and league MVP (to go along with his All-Star game MVP earlier that year). So Willis had a once-in-a-lifetime season. As for other individual awards, Lew Alcindor was voted Rookie of the Year, the Knicks’ Red Holzman was picked as Coach of the Year, and Jerry West led the league in scoring, averaging 31.2 points a game. Lenny Wilkins led in assists, getting 9.1 a game, while Elvin Hayes won the rebounding crown with 16.9 a game (Wes finished a close second, snatching 16.7 a game). As for the All-NBA, the First Team consisted of Billy Cunningham, Jerry West, Walt Frazier, Connie Hawkins, and Willis Reed. The Second Team was made up of Oscar Robertson, Gus Johnson, John Havlicek, Lou Hudson, and Lew Alcindor. As for the All-Defensive NBA team, Dave DeBusschere, Willis Reed, Jerry West, Gus Johnson, and Walt Frazier made up the first squad, while the Second Team consisted of Bill Bridges, Lew Alcindor, John Havlicek, Jerry Sloan, and Joe Caldwell. The All-Rookie team was Eldo “Dick” Garrett of the Lakers, Mike Davis of Baltimore, Jo Jo White from Boston, and Lew Alcindor and Bobby Dandridge from Milwaukee.
Despite my knee problems, I still led the Bullets in scoring with 1,922 points, an average of 23.4 points a game. Kevin Loughery finished second with 1,325 points and an average of 21.9 points a game. Like I said, we missed his scoring in the last month or so of the season, especially down the stretch and throughout the playoffs. I often found myself wondering what the outcome might have been for our team if Kevin and I had both been healthy—and Mike Davis, too—throughout the entire season. I also led our squad in scoring during the playoffs, averaging 28 points per game. In addition, I dished out 4.9 assists a game. So all in all I had a pretty good year, despite not making the All-Star team or the All-NBA team, both of which I had made the year before.
After the season was over I could rest my body for a while in Baltimore, party a little, spend some snuggling time, and just think a lot of things through regarding how the Bullets could get better as a team. I knew I had to get some medical attention for my sore knees, so I would have to take care of that over the summer at Kernan Hospital. Then, after the operation, I was going to go home to Germantown and spend some quality time with my family and my old close friends at my mother’s house. Mostly, though, I would get myself some much-needed rest, then rehab my knees and get in tip-top shape to play another long NBA season with the hope that its conclusion would be more satisfying than the last two had been.
Chapter 14
THE PAIN OF GETTING CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR: 1970 TO 1971
AFTER ALL THE PROBLEMS I HAD HAD with my knees during the past season, I decided I had to do something to fix them, which meant I couldn’t play in the Baker League that summer. So the first thing on my agenda that offseason was to have operations on both knees. This was the first time in my basketball career that I had been hampered by injury, and the problem went back to jamming my knees up in that car wreck I had in Harlem with my good friend Wilkie back in the day. That was when the problems with my knees first started. I knew I had little bumps on both knees after that accident, but the pain soon went away and I never really thought about it again because I didn’t think it was serious. But when I first came to the Bullets I started having this pain in my knees and it kept getting worse, though it never prevented me from playing. So I went to the Bullets’ trainer, a guy named Skip Feldman, to see if he could help me with the pain. After a couple of visits with him he came up with the idea for me to wear kneepads that had a contraption in them—a sort of mechanism—that ran across my knees and kept them warm during practices and games. Skip’s contraption was hooked up to batteries inside the
kneepads and worked like one of those heating pads that people apply to their sore backs. That was Skip’s idea, and it was ingenious. So that’s why I started wearing kneepads and they worked for a while.
But in the 1969–1970 season the little knots had grown so serious that the pain hampered me to the point where sometimes I couldn’t perform at my usual high level, and that was a problem. So I really had to have them looked at and taken care of during the off-season. So I went to see a team of doctors who were specialists in dealing with knees, especially those of athletes. They told me I had developed inflammation in these little knots below my kneecaps called “bursas,” which are little fluid-filled sacs that help muscles and tendons slide over bones. I had it in both knees, though it was worse in the right one. The pain I was having was a lot like the discomfort of jumper’s knee, which is what players that jump real high in basketball, like Gus Johnson, can suffer from. Bursas are really painful when they are inflamed, which can happen over the course of the 82-game NBA season. So the Bullets’ doctors recommended that I have them surgically removed. With that in mind, I scheduled the operation for sometime in the middle of June at Kernan Hospital, which is located in Woodlawn, Maryland, near Baltimore, on an 85-acre wooded campus. Man, that place was beautiful! My only request was that they make the cuts sideways, you know, horizontal instead of vertical—up and down—so the scars would blend in with the lines on my knees, because I’ve always been vain about things like that. The surgeon thought that was crazy and started teasing me about having a procedure done in a certain way to satisfy my vanity. He thought the vertical cuts would be better, especially in terms of my rehab. But I was adamant about the way I wanted it done and so they satisfied my wishes and made the cuts horizontally, which they kept teasing me about by calling them “Earl’s vanity cuts.”